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120Explanationism about Freedom and OrthonomyJournal of Philosophy. forthcoming.According to a popular idea, freedom is grounded in orthonomy – the ability to be responsive to normative demands. But how exactly must an agent’s action relate to their reasons in order for this orthonomous relationship to hold? In this paper, I propose a novel explanationist answer to this question. I argue that extant answers – causalism and modalism about orthonomy – fail because they fail to account for the fact that intuitions about freedom and orthonomy track facts about explanation. And …Read more
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17Why and When is Pure Moral Motivation DefectiveErkenntnis 89 (2): 665-684. 2024.Agents sometimes have a final, de dicto desire to do what is right. They desire to do what is right for its own sake and under this description. These agents have pure moral motivation (PMM). It is often surmised that PMM is in some sense defective. Most famously, it has been suggested that PMM manifests a kind of moral fetishism. However, it also seems defective if an agent shows no concern whatsoever for moral rightness in their motivations. In this paper, I attempt to resolve this puzzling te…Read more
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88Failure and Success in AgencyPhilosophical Quarterly 74 (2): 590-613. 2024.Agency often consists in performing actions and engaging in activities that are successful. We pour glasses, catch objects, carry things, recite poems, and play instruments. It has therefore seemed tempting in recent philosophical thinking to conceptualise the relationship between our agentive abilities and our successes as follows: (Success) S is exercising their ability to ϕ only if S successfully ϕ-s. This paper argues that (Success) is false based on the observation that agency also often co…Read more
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220Alethische und Narrative Modelle von VerschwörungstheorienZeitschrift für Praktische Philosophie 9 (2): 143-174. 2023.The aim of this paper is to create dialectical space for a hitherto under-discussed option in the philosophy of conspiracy theories. The extant literature on the topic almost exclusively assumes that conspiracy theories are a type of explanation. The typical mental attitude towards explanations is belief, a representational attitude that can be assessed as true, false, warranted or unwarranted. I call models based on this assumption alethic models. Alethic models can’t pick out conspiracy theori…Read more
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Breaking good : is there a patent recipe for cooking up the moral pill?In Abraham Zvie Bar-On (ed.), Grazer Philosophische Studien, Distributed in the U.s.a. By Humanities Press. 1986.
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407Actual Control - Demodalising Free WillDissertation, University of Leeds. 2020.Plausibly, agents act freely iff their actions are responses to reasons. But what sort of relationship between reason and action is required for the action to count as a response? The overwhelmingly dominant answer to this question is modalist. It holds that responses are actions that share a modally robust or secure relationship with the relevant reasons. This thesis offers a new alternative answer. It argues that responses are actions that can be explained by reasons in the right way. This exp…Read more
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109Reasons-responsiveness, modality and rational blind spotsPhilosophical Studies 180 (1): 293-316. 2022.Many think it is plausible that agents enjoy freedom and responsibility with respect to their actions in virtue of being reasons-responsive. Extant accounts spell out reasons-responsiveness (RR) as a general modal property. The agent is responsive to reasons for and against ϕ-ing, according to this idea, if they ϕ in accordance with the balance of reasons in a suitable proportion of possible situations. This paper argues that freedom and responsibility are not grounded in such modal properties o…Read more
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79Why and When is Pure Moral Motivation DefectiveErkenntnis 87 (2): 665-684. 2022.Agents sometimes have a final, de dicto desire to do what is right. They desire to do what is right for its own sake and under this description. These agents have pure moral motivation (PMM). It is often surmised that PMM is in some sense defective. Most famously, it has been suggested that PMM manifests a kind of moral fetishism. However, it also seems defective if an agent shows no concern whatsoever for moral rightness in their motivations. In this paper, I attempt to resolve this puzzling te…Read more
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106Actual Sequences, Frankfurt-Cases, and Non-accidentalityInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (10): 1269-1288. 2022.ABSTRACT There are two tenets about free agency that have proven difficult to combine: free agency is grounded in an agent’s possession or exercise of their reasons-responsiveness, only actual sequence features can ground free agency. This paper argues that and can only be reconciled if we recognise that their clash is just the particular manifestation of a wider conflict between two approaches to the notion of non-accidentality. According to modalism, p is non-accidentally connected to q iff p …Read more
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49Intentionen, Misserfolg und die Ausübung von Fähigkeiten: Bemerkungen zu Agents' Abilities von Romy JasterZeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 74 (3): 454-459. 2020.
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Free Will |
Practical Reason |
Action Theory |
Areas of Interest
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Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Free Will |
Practical Reason |
Action Theory |
Meta-Ethics |